YIMBY

Good article in the NYT about our collective obligation to add more housing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/business/economy/housing-crisis-conor-dougherty-golden-gates.html?referringSource=articleShare

“America has a housing crisis. The homeownership rate for young adults is at a multidecade low, and about a quarter of renters send more than half their income to the landlord. Homelessness is resurgent, eviction displaces a million households a year, and about four million people spend at least three hours driving to and from work.

One need only look out an airplane window to see that this has nothing to do with a lack of space. It’s the concentration of opportunity and the rising cost of being near it. It says much about today’s winner-take-all economy that many of the cities with the most glaring epidemics of homelessness are growing centers of technology and finance. There is, simply put, a dire shortage of housing in places where people and companies want to live — and reactionary local politics that fight every effort to add more homes...”




AARP has a publication available for download on their website called Making Room Housing For A Changing America, which addresses this very issue.  Premise is that the composition of American Households is changing; but the kinds of housing we are building does not meet the needs of our changing households.  According to their research: Only 20% of American households are nuclear families, yet most of our housing stock has been built with nuclear families in mind.  America's middle class is shrinking making it more difficult for households to afford to purchase our existing homes and apartments.  The publication goes on to suggest a number of possible solutions including flexible housing units with retracting walls that enable each unit to be configured to meet the needs of its occupants and accessory dwelling units (ADUs) which are small houses. 



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